


Hey, I Just Met You

by polytropic



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: M/M, Magic!Stiles, Mates, reincarnation and past lives, teacher!Deaton, warning: description of warfare and mass plague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-25
Updated: 2012-09-25
Packaged: 2017-11-15 00:33:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/521156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polytropic/pseuds/polytropic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Stiles remembers some things about himself and his pasts. Chief among them, the realization that Derek Hale has stalking him down to such a fine art because he's apparently been doing it for a very long time. </p>
<p>(Basically reincarnation is my excuse to write lots of mini AUs.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hey, I Just Met You

He’s alone in the tundra when the wolves find him. Stiles is afraid, but he’s been learning about that bright, white-hot energy inside him, so when lithe shapes slink towards him he shuffles a hand through the short grass, gathering up a bit of borrowed power, and flings it high into the air. It bursts, brighter than a torch, and yelps and howls echo around him as the wolves try to hide their eyes.

  
“There was no need for that.” Suddenly there is a man standing there. He’s large and powerful, with thick matted dark hair, and he has one hand over his eyes. Stiles glances at the indents in the snow where his feet are, and sees where the prints changed from four legs to two. Oh. This is one of those things his teacher said he was too young to know about, the sorts of creatures that lurked beyond the borders of the home fire.

  
“I have more tricks like that. My blood won’t come cheaply,” he bluffs.

  
“No need,” the man repeats, though his teeth flash in amusement as if he caught the lie. “We only came to see who it was. You’re not the woman who usually comes to see us, though you smell like her, a little.”  
His teacher knows these…people? Stiles relaxes, just a little. “I am Stiles.”

  
“Derek,” the leader of the wolves says, expression still amused but also…intent. “Do you need help finding your way home to your fire, Stiles?”

~~~~

Derek brings up the subject when they’re lying tangled together in bed, mostly, Stiles thinks, because that way he can stare at the ceiling contemplatively without having to make eye contact.

  
“If I you could buy my contract, would you?”

  
“She isn’t selling,” Stiles answers. His limbs are heavy and tired, hollow in the way he always feels after sex, but if they were able to tense right now they would.

  
“If she was.”

  
Stiles is not exactly wealthy. He certainly can’t afford an entire family of hereditary bondswolves, the way she can. But…maybe one. He might, some day, have enough for one.  
He’s been silent too long. Derek doesn’t move at all, but his stillness has a different quality to it now. Stiles takes a deep breath.

  
“I wouldn’t buy you just for your claws. Or even for your cock. You know that, don’t you?”

  
Derek’s stillness turns rigid with shock for a moment and then he’s hovering above Stiles on all fours, eyes wide and searching Stiles’ face. Stiles just lifts his chin and meets the stare head-on. He wouldn’t have said it if he wasn’t ready to stand by it.

  
“Honestly?” Derek demands. His voice always gets harsh when he least means it to, Stiles has learned.

  
“The gods’ own truth,” he replies, and Derek ducks his face down and kisses him, hard, but not before he sees the start of a big, wide smile.

  
“I would be your vassal, if you will have me,” Derek murmurs into his mouth, desperately formal.

  
“I will, I will, I do,” Stiles promises.

~~~

One of their siege towers is in flames and the fires are spreading, but it’s all right, it’s all going to be okay, Stiles has a plan. He’s been left with a small unit, just three wolves, but that’s all he needs provided this actually goes okay. “Get the barrel in place and then get out of there, all right?” he tells the leader of the unit. Erica nods, sharp and professional, then glances at Boyd when he shifts a little.

  
“Question?” Stiles asks.

  
“Blasting powder doesn’t light without a spark,” Boyd rumbles. Stiles grins.

  
“I am a spark.”

  
They don’t ask anything more, just salute and leave. Stiles chews on the strap of his glove as they vanish into the chaos of the battlefield, though his senses fly with them, pinned to that barrel of powder by the symbol painted on the side. Selfishly, he tried to find Derek in the roil of bodies below, tries to cast his eye as far as it will go, to see any glimpse of that Wolf’s Head shield. He doesn’t find it, but he would know if the protections he cast on it had failed. That has to be enough, for now.

  
The barrel is in place. Stiles can feel the weight of the water behind the dam rushing past his awareness, hears a scream as Erica cuts down a mercenary trying to waylay their flight. Stiles signals the trumpets to sound the retreat.

  
_Derek, listen, for once,_ he begs silently, counts slowly to one hundred to give as many of their fighters as possible time to get out, and then focuses in on the blasting powder and ignites.

  
There is a muffled whump of air, a breathless pause, and then the shriek of stone on stone. The dam shifts, buckles….and explodes outward, a torrent of water rushing over the field and drowning everything in its path. Bodies are swept away, black specks in the pouring tide. Stiles feels fear, and grief, and lives winking out. He accepts that it is his doing.

  
It isn’t until he sees their own forces marching back and searches in vain for the Derek’s crest among them that he starts to panic. More and more faces return, bloodstained and giddy, and Derek’s face still isn’t there, and Stiles doesn’t-he can’t-

  
The bright flash of light on metal catches his eye. On the one siege tower that remains standing, far above the slowly quieting waters, someone is patiently flashing three short bursts of reflected sunlight with a long pause in between. Stiles squints, and laughs in relief.

  
“You lunatic, how did you even get up there,” he mutters, and goes to find a boat.

~~~~

They meet for the first time in months as they’re burying their dead.

  
“Laura,” Derek says, face blank, as he shovels dirt over the body in the shroud.

  
“Scott,” Stiles responds, more tears leaking out even though he’d thought he’d cried them all. Derek finishes burying his sister’s body—his bright, driven, smart sister, who had said she might help Stiles out, might teach him to read some day, before all this had happened—and comes to help Stiles. Stiles aches as Derek takes the shovel from him and he sees the fever-brightness in his eyes.

  
“Allison?” Derek asks.

  
“Still healthy,” Stiles responds, remembering how she had screamed, how she was probably even now still begging the fever to take her too. _Unlike us_ , he doesn’t say, because he knows Derek can see the tremors shaking his body. They’re more frequent than yesterday.

  
Derek finishes digging the hole, and they both lower Scott into it, Stiles’ eyes and throat burning with the need for tears that won’t come any more. “I’ll see you soon,” he tells his friend’s body, a hitch in his throat. Behind him, Derek makes a wounded noise. Arms wrap around him, trying futilely to still his shivers.

  
“I never said. I meant to…” Derek starts, and doesn’t finish the thought.

  
“I thought we had time,” Stiles agrees, quietly.

  
“I’ll find you. Or-or wait for you. I’m not going to Heaven if you’re not there,” Derek promises fiercely, and Stiles chokes on a laugh and finds out oh, look, he had more tears left after all.

~~~~

"What the hell is this." A thick sheaf of papers drops onto the table in front of Stiles, and he takes a long, careful look at them as if he doesn't know exactly what they are.

  
"Cargo manifests. You think you'd know that, being of a nautical persuasion as you are."

  
"They're in your hand."

  
"No, they're on the table," Stiles corrects cheerfully, his grin widening in glee when the captain looks ready to throttle him. "I took the liberty of transcribing them, is all. No harm done. Some avoided, really, what with all the corrections I made."

  
"You are a passenger. Leave my crew be to do their jobs, and do your own."

  
Stiles cocks a challenging eyebrow. "If I may be so bold, Captain Hale--"

  
"You may not."

  
"--I think your true meaning is, 'stop doing my job better than I do.'"

  
Absolute fury sparks in dark eyes. "You want the books? Here. They're yours. You are not permitted to leave this room until you have fully transcribed every document for this journey." He drops two leather-bound journals onto the table with a loud 'thump'. After them come three more stacks of paper, messy, stained and in some cases torn. The door slams behind him on the way out.

  
Stiles looks at the mess of records in front of him. "Death by boredom, or death by Captain?" he muses to himself, and pulls the first one towards him.

~~~~

“Are you, or have you ever been, a werewolf, lycan, shifter, or a member of the Communist Party?”

  
Derek holds his hands steady in his lap. “On the advice of counsel, I plead the Fifth Amendment,” he says, just like Stiles coached him to.

~~~  
Stiles wakes up in the exam room of the animal clinic. Deaton is giving him a very strange look, so apparently Stiles has been talking in his sleep. Vision. Vision-sleep.

  
Stiles tries to talk, coughs, and gratefully accepts the glass of water he is handed.

  
“So, yep, totally had magic in at least one or two of them,” he says cheerfully as soon as he can speak. “So teaching me is a green light, right?”

  
“How many of them was he in?” Deaton asks. Stiles pauses. He’d really hoped Deaton hadn’t heard that, or at least would be kind enough to pretend he hadn’t.

  
“Every single one,” he admits. He tries to think of a way to play this off as a joke, as a coincidence, as anything other than the huge, portentous thing it feels like. He can’t. “Why was his name always the same?”

  
“It wasn’t, that’s just what you know him as. That's also why he looked how he does to you now, instead of whatever body he or she actually had back then,” Deaton informs him. He looks at Stiles for a very long moment, then turns to one of the books beside him and scans through the index. Stiles hopes there’s an entry in there entitled ‘So Your New Protégé Has Just had Visions of His Past Lives And Every Single One Included a Grumpy, Ridiculously Hot Werewolf That Currently Wants To Kill Him? 101 Ways That This Is Something Other Than Mated Soulbonding, Complete With FAQ!’

  
Somehow, he doubts it though. "I think I was a pirate in one of them," he mumbles, and tries to convince himself that the revelation that he was pretty awesome in his past lives is what's making his heart pound so fast.

**Author's Note:**

> So, I have some real concerns about this work, mostly having to do with issues of whitewashing. I tried to convey that Stiles and Derek have been in a lot of bodies throughout the years, from all different places and times, but that Stiles in his vision saw Derek as the version that he currently knows because that's how he recognizes him. I'm not sure if that was the right choice, so if you have strong feelings one way or the other, weigh in?
> 
> Also I can't believe I named this after Call Me Maybe. I'm so sorry. I'm just bad at names, okay?


End file.
